Anxiety & stress Articles

Do you tell yourself every year that this is the holiday season when you will be the picture of calm, cool and collected at the family gathering? Only to find yourself mired in guilt and shame come Boxing Day, for yet again saying or doing all the wrong things the day before? Read our advice...

This holiday season might be festive for some, but for others it can feel like sheer torture. If you suffer from depression, are isolated, feel alone, or suffer from low self-esteem and feelings of failure, this can be the time of year that suicidal thoughts run riot in your mind. Is there anything at all...

It’s not an easy season for many. Our usual techniques for staying calm can be rendered suddenly useless. So what are some quick tactics to get you back to balanced if you suffer Christmas anxiety? 1. Say the one word you’ve avoided saying. Many of us pretend we’ll say no…… then we don’t. But this...

EDMR stands for Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing. An extensively researched and evidence-based psychotherapy (proven effective), it was originally designed to help people who had experienced trauma. What is EMDR? EMDR changes the way that traumatic memories are held within the brain. The goal is to lower the distress such memories cause, leaving you more able...

When it comes to anxiety vs depression, there are a lot of similarities. Both anxiety and depression can: involve negative thinking and distorted thinking leave you feeling hopeless and out-of-control can see you uninterested in your usual hobbies and activities can cause sleep problems and burnout can leave you feeling unable to cope. So how can...

Have you always secretly maintained that being emotionally vulnerable is a terrible idea? For those of us who experienced childhood trauma (and sadly, that’s many of us) avoiding emotional vulnerability might have been a useful survival tactic. We just couldn’t bear to feel any more emotional pain, so we learned to dodge it. But are...

Do you wake up once or several times a night and find it hard to fall back to sleep? Is your heart racing? And, more importantly, your mind, too? You might be suffering from anxiety at night. Is anxiety at night really anxiety? Night anxiety is the same as anxiety in the day, it’s just...

Going through a traumatic experience is difficult enough. But the aftermath can be even more confusing. Moods can swing wildly, you can feel anxious and socially withdraw, and you might not be able to cope with day-to-day life. Physical symptoms include fatigue, muscle tension and feeling flu-like. What is going on in your body and brain to...

Transgenerational trauma refers to trauma that passes through generations. The idea is that not only can someone experience trauma, they can then pass the symptoms and behaviours of trauma survival on to their children, who then might further pass these along the family line. Transgenerational trauma is also called ‘intergenerational trauma’. What types of trauma...

Have you experienced something overwhelming and frightening? It’s likely you will experience some form of psychological shock afterwards. But when is shock normal and to be left to resolve itself, and when is emotional shock a real problem? And what is the difference between acute stress disorder vs PTSD? For a clear explanation on what exactly...